The Right Honourable Baroness Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady herself, shuffled off this mortal coil last week.
Readers in the audience that were of school age during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s will remember Margaret Thatcher as the Prime Minister of the UK from 1979 to 1990.
Thatcher is widely credited with initiating the end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the western powers, as well as revitalizing Britain’s moribund economy through union-busting and privatization.
What may not have been covered in those middle school Social Studies classes, was that The Right Honourable Baroness enjoyed a snootful of Scotch after dinner, and sometimes even before.
Not being close enough to London to attend the funeral, I paid my respects to the Iron Lady by cracking open a bottle of Bell’s Blended Scotch Whisky, and even going to the extreme step of mixing it with water in deference of her preferred method of imbibing.
Your intrepid liquor reporter is an unrepentent whisky snob, preferring my Scotches to be single malt, and not to be sullied with mixers or ice.
Mrs. Thatcher, on the other hand, was a woman of the people, with her preferred brand the most popular blended Scotch in the UK, mixed sparingly with water.
The history of Bell’s Blended Scotch Whisky starts in 1825, with a young man named Arthur Bell, who learned the whisky trade in the small Scottish town of Perth.
By 1850, Arthur Bell had put his own name above the door, and was highly sought after as a master blender with a reputation for producing superb blends from mature whiskies.
Since the British Isles never experienced the dark days of Prohibition like the Canuck or Yankee colonies, the Bell’s Scotch Whiskey has been continuously producing fine spirits for nearly 200 years, and has been the most popular whisky in the UK every year since 1978.
As is common in the drinks industry the Bell’s brand of whisky has gone through a number of mergers and acquisitions over the years, at times being owned by Guinness, United Distillers, and eventually ended up in the stable of Diageo, the world’s largest producer of spirits.
Luckily, Bell’s Original Blended Scotch Whisky is still produced true to the original recipe, with up to 40 different single malts individually aged before being blended to the flavour that has won the hearts of the UK boozing public.
The base malt used for Bell’s is a whisky from their Blair Athol distillery, located 100km north of Edinburgh. The barley grown in this area provides a fresh and fruity aroma, with spice and smoke in the finish.
To maintain a consistent product from year to year, the base malt whisky is blended with up to 40 other whiskies from different distilleries to achieve the flavour profile that the master blender is looking for.
Interestingly, even distilleries that vigorously compete with each other will sell their young whiskies to master blenders for further maturation, blending, and even sale under a different label.
Taste-wise, Bell’s is somewhat similar to Canadian Club, a whisky experiencing a resurgence in popularity due to it being the preferred tipple of Don Draper on the popular Mad Men television series.
Bell’s is also fairly similar in price to Canadian Club, with $27 being the average price for a 750mL bottle.
While immensely popular in the UK, Bell’s has yet to take the Canadian whisky market by storm, perhaps due to our patriotic choice to drink locally produced whisky like Crown Royal or Canadian Club.
Still, a quick glance at www.liquorconnect.com shows Bell’s as being in stock at 15 different liquor stores in Calgary, so it is not exactly unheard of on this side of the pond.
Your humble narrator certainly had no trouble finding a bottle, although the store clerk did tell me that he had sold more Bell’s Whisky in the past 3 days than the entire previous month, so there must have been a few other people that had the same idea.
Whether you loved or loathed her, sipping a wee dram of fine Scotch is a fitting way to commemorate such an event. If your local watering hole doesn’t stock Bell’s, ask for a Canadian Club, as it’s what Maggie drank on state visits to Canada.
